Nature Notes with Graham Workman

Well very similar to the last few years May is nearly finished and not a cuckoo heard!! Thirty years ago the call of a cuckoo was a pretty common occurrence on the field edges around the woodland at Haigh. Gradually the calls got less and less and if I hear one on my wanderings I’m a very happy chappie. In the marshy areas along the canal Reed and Sedge Warblers were regular victims of fostering a cuckoo’s chick – sadly (but I suppose happily for the warblers those days appear to be gone!

So what happened to our cuckoo’s?

We have lost more than a third of our Cuckoos in the past 25 years and in all honesty there’s no real clear reason why! So the clever chaps at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) decided way back in 2011 to fit some cuckoos with tracking devices to follow their progress from Britain all the way to their wintering quarters in Africa. Since it began in 2011, the BTO Cuckoo Tracking Project has tagged more than 100 Cuckoos. Its work has revealed that English Cuckoos migrate more often via routes associated with higher mortality than Scottish Cuckoos do. This year is the first year that the project has tagged Cuckoos in Ireland too, which will reveal for the first time the routes that these birds take. The differences in survival rates are linked to the conditions the birds encounter at the sites in southern Europe where they stop to refuel. The availability of large insect prey on their breeding grounds in the UK and Ireland may also impact their ability to successfully complete their migration south.

This year the BTO have fitted more Cuckoos with state-of-the-art satellite tags, allowing scientists and the public to track their annual migration to central Africa and back Following these birds on migration will help researchers understand the pressures they face.

The good news is that Anyone can follow the BTO Cuckoos on migration by visiting www.bto.org/cuckoos. It’s definitely worth having a look – some fascinating info there.

Their way south is the next and most dangerous stage of the birds’ lives and are an incredible journey and no easy feat for a bird A few months ago we flew to Botswana and what a journey that was! And we were sat comfortably in an Airbus 380 Flying at 35,000ft and at 500km an hour. I did actually think about some of our summer migrants that take the same route. After heading out across the English Channel and south through Europe, the Cuckoos have a Mediterranean Sea crossing to contend with before they face the Sahara, the biggest challenge of them all. Most ‘hop over’ the desert in a single non-stop flight, travelling at altitudes of up to 5 km to avoid the worst of the heat.

The birds with the satellite tags will help us to better understand the pressures they face, the reasons for the population declines they are undergoing in large parts of the UK and how we can help them to successfully complete their arduous migrations in the rapidly changing world we share.